Monterrey, Mexico – It was a dramatic fall for 2 high-ranking members of Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa cartel.
On July 25, the USA introduced it had arrested 76-year-old Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and 38-year-old Joaquin Guzman Lopez at a rural airport close to El Paso, Texas.
One was the cartel’s co-founder. The opposite was the son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, one other co-founder within the drug-trafficking syndicate.
However whereas the US has hailed the arrests as a victory in its efforts to cease cross-border smuggling, consultants in Mexico concern what occurred could unleash a wave of instability, each by way of worldwide relations and native safety.
Two weeks later, a lot stays unclear. Even the circumstances surrounding the sudden arrests are shrouded in thriller.
Talking anonymously, US officers have instructed journalists that Guzman Lopez lured Zambada onto a small propeller aircraft below the guise of inspecting clandestine airstrips in northern Mexico.
However, the officers defined, it was a lure: Guzman Lopez deliberate to give up to US officers and needed to deliver Zambada down with him.
Zambada’s lawyer, Frank Perez, has contested this account, alleging that Guzman Lopez as a substitute kidnapped his consumer. Perez additionally rejected hypothesis that Zambada willingly surrendered.
Each males have since pleaded not responsible to drug-trafficking costs in US courtroom.
Whereas the circumstances that introduced Zambada to the US are unlikely to have any bearing on the legal costs he faces, Falko Ernst, a senior safety analyst on the Worldwide Disaster Group, stated the state of affairs might probably harm cross-border relations with Mexico.
The Mexican authorities, in any case, voiced frustration on the shock nature of the arrests.
“That would very effectively backfire by way of additional curbing belief between each international locations, by way of collaborating on issues of safety,” Ernst stated. “We’ll see to what diploma Mexico will attempt to depart clear that they don’t seem to be followers of this kind of factor changing into a normalcy.”
The cross-border relationship, Ernst added, is a vital one to each international locations. “Safety is just one pillar of a really complicated bilateral relationship that additionally contains commerce, commerce, manufacturing, the vitality sector and migration, amongst different issues.”
Already, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Rosa Icela Rodriguez, the nation’s safety secretary, have referred to as for the US to disclose the circumstances surrounding the arrests.
“You ask if it was a supply, if it was seize,” Icela Rodriguez stated in an interplay with reporters in the course of the president’s morning press convention on July 26. “That’s a part of the investigation and a part of the data that we might expect from the federal government of the USA.”
On August 2, Mexico’s Overseas Secretary Alicia Barcena additionally defined that she had requested her US counterpart, Antony Blinken, for an in depth report concerning the aircraft that transported the drug traffickers, together with its takeoff location.
The arrests come at a pivotal second within the bilateral relations between the US and Mexico. The US is within the midst of a heated presidential race, and immigration is a prime election concern.
Ernst identified that there’s a rising discourse in Washington, primarily amongst Republicans, that aggressive army motion is required to confront the cartels and cease them from trafficking fentanyl and different medicine.
Figures like former President Donald Trump have referred to as on the US to “wage struggle on the cartels”. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis even threatened to “ship within the Coast Guard and the Navy” if Mexican ports weren’t secured.
“These extra hardline voices have been gathering steam,” Ernst stated.
All of the whereas, he added, bilateral relations have deteriorated, and there’s a rising sense that persistence is dwindling. “We’ve seen a stagnation and inertia in defining safety cooperation and safety coverage in Mexico.”
However the tensions following Zambada and Guzman Lopez’s arrests usually are not solely on the worldwide scale.
Andres Villarreal, a journalist based mostly in Culiacan, Sinaloa, warns the occasions of July 25 might intensify violence in particular areas of Mexico itself.
The journalist described an uneasy calm within the northwestern state of Sinaloa, because the arrests have put the inhabitants on edge. “It’s like that calm that occurs after a storm — or earlier than a storm,” he stated.
Within the months previous the arrests, Sinaloa had already skilled a collection of upheavals in its eponymous cartel, Villarreal defined.
Federal forces had intensified their presence in sure areas, resulting in arrests, captures and even deaths amongst key members of the drug-trafficking organisation.
These assaults on the cartel’s hierarchy have heightened the uncertainty amongst residents who concern violent reprisals.
Iliana Padilla Reyes, a professor on the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico who has studied violence and peace-building in her house state of Sinaloa, defined to Al Jazeera that the cartel operates inside a well-established construction, ruled by violence.
Key figures in each authorized and unlawful spheres dictate the principles inside this method.
“This coverage of going after the heads of organised crime is what has prompted these violent breaches of agreements, and that generates numerous instability,” Padilla Reyes stated.
One potential consequence of those arrests, given the elimination of a key chief like Zambada, is a succession dispute.
The extent to which this might set off infighting amongst Sinaloa cartel factions stays unsure. Villarreal famous that, whereas hypothesis abounds, it’s doubtless the arrests will provoke important turbulence inside the organisation and its broader ecosystem.
The journalist predicts the turmoil might have an effect on the drug “switch routes, what the enterprise itself represents, who it covers, who’s across the enterprise [and] the cells which are scattered all through the nation”.
“As a result of we aren’t simply speaking concerning the state of Sinaloa,” Villarreal stated, pointing to the worldwide community the cartel controls.
Ernst, the safety analyst, echoed that statement. He believes the results of Zambada’s arrest will stretch throughout Mexico and past.
“The Sinaloa cartel has a presence in virtually all of Mexico’s states. So the ripples might be felt actually all through Mexico but additionally past Mexico, seeing how the Sinaloa cartel does have a presence in Central America, South America and different components of the world as effectively,” he stated.
That instability, he defined, is one consequence of concentrating on high-level drug lords with out confronting the entire cartel construction.
That strategy — often known as the “kingpin technique” — has lengthy been a cornerstone of the US’s so-called “struggle on medicine”. The thought is that, by attacking the management, the remainder of the cartel is left in disarray.
However critics like Ernst stated the “kingpin technique” has not dismantled main drug-trafficking organisations in Mexico however has reasonably fragmented them.
“This has actually left the nation with a really, very excessive variety of extremely violent feuds between a higher variety of smaller or medium-sized legal teams that emerged from splintering off from far larger and extra cohesive legal organisations,” stated Ernst.
He added that flashy arrests centered on big-name criminals typically engender a simplistic “good versus evil” narrative, obscuring the intricate nature of legal networks and their connections to the federal government.
“It’s politically handy to have the ability to focus and to sign out the stereotypical dangerous guys and perpetuate that story of the omnipotent legal actor and cartel that exists independently from state energy, which isn’t the case,” Ernst defined.
Consultants like Ernst and Padilla have been adamant that the July arrests is not going to disrupt the movement of narcotics into the US, regardless of how necessary Zambada and Guzman Lopez have been to Mexico’s drug commerce.
Padilla defined that earlier arrests of El Chapo and his different son Ovidio Guzman Lopez in 2023 additionally didn’t halt the manufacturing and trafficking of gear like cocaine and fentanyl.
Villarreal went additional, quoting Zambada’s phrases from a 2010 interview with the late Mexican journalist Julio Scherer: “In the event that they catch me or kill me … nothing adjustments.”
“He himself establishes that nothing is definitely going to occur,” Villarreal defined.
Zambada could have been the Sinaloa cartel’s most up-to-date figurehead, however Villarreal believes his position as chief will simply be stuffed by one other.
“Proper now his identify is Ismael, and tomorrow he might be referred to as Andres, Juan, Francisco, no matter it might be. Will probably be somebody very related who will take management of the organisation.”
